Far to Go by Alison Pick, Paperback: 336 pages, Harper Perennial (April 19, 2011), ISBN-10: 9780062034625, List price: $14.95
By Laurel Corona
SAN DIEGO– Far to Go gets under your skin early and stays there. This new novel by Canadian writer Alison Pick follows the fate of one affluent Jewish family caught up in the quick fall of the Sudetenland and the surrounding region early in World War II. The story is told largely from the perspective of a loyal family servant and nanny, a young Christian girl, whose deep love for a little boy and admiration and awe of his parents cause her to throw in her fate with theirs in increasingly complex ways.
Opening the novel and interspersed throughout are letters from an archive being searched after the war by an unidentified narrator. The letters foreshadow the story to come. A parent writes to a British couple who has taken in her child sent by kindertransport. An elderly mother writes to see how her son is faring. A brother stranded elsewhere asks for news of his family. Each ends with the ominous words “FILE UNDER,” followed by a name and a cryptic note about the letter writer’s fate. Died Birkenau. Died Auschwitz. None of them, characters who will become known over the course of the book, escaped that fate.
Also interspersed are the ruminations of this unnamed narrator as she visits an old man dying in the hospital. Who they are is not known, but Pick adds just enough information in each of these scenes so that it doesn’t feel manipulative or irritating, as it might in the hands of a less skilled writer. No “you have to read the whole book to know what this is about,” but rather a slow unfolding of the larger framework, the postwar continuation of the story. By the end, the identities of these two individuals come as no surprise, but the reader is unlikely to feel that anything has been given away too easily, or that suspense was, in the end, Pick’s goal at all.
The main point of view character for the narrative, the Christian servant Marta, is a quiet young woman lacking the self esteem to resist a brutal, married employee of the firm owned by her Jewish employer Pavel Bauer. This man, Ernst, a Christian, savagely couples with her standing up against stone walls, yet she thinks of him as her lover. Clearly his friendliness with Pavel and his family hides the heart of someone always looking for his own quick advantage regardless of the cost to others. When he moves in to “help” Pavel save his company, no one reading the book will be fooled.
Marta is dazzled by self-centered Anneliese Bauer, Pavel’s wife, whose every move, even the way she exhales cigarette smoke, evokes the glamor of a movie star. Pavel is a gentle, thoughtful, and self-effacing man whose kindness and respectful treatment of others play a large role in Marta’s personal growth throughout the book. Anneliese and Pavel are secular Jews, the kind who arrange a visit from Santa Claus to their little boy but ignore the High Holy Days. Anneliese feels so removed from the culture that she can say at one point that she doesn’t “feel Jewish. No more than I feel…I don’t know…Catholic.” Though Pavel is equally secular in lifestyle, the tribulations of the Jews make him, unlike his wife, want to run toward rather than away from that identity.
The relationship between Marta and the other characters forms the heart of the narrative. Marta is by turns an employee and a confidante, an equal and an outsider. Pick takes the reader into the Bauer’s living room for cocktails, sits us at their table for their decidedly unkosher meals, and follows them into their bedroom to show the ordinariness of their lives and habits as the outside world threatens to engulf them. Much of the novel revolves around their differences of opinion about how to survive the anti-Semitic fervor they realize they cannot escape simply by not “acting like Jews,” and whether it is better to stay in their home and protect what they have, or lose it all in a bid to escape.
Characterization is the greatest strength of this novel, with the crowning achievement being Marta’s charge, an enchanting little boy named Pepik. Readers, prepare to love him!
Pick has a great sense for the telling detail, the snippet of dialogue or description that captures everything. In a particularly well done scene, Pavel begs to “pat the horsies” he passes in the street. His mother drags him along without pausing to indulge him. Her mission is a grave one. Against Pavel’s wishes, she has decided to baptize their son in an ill-considered attempt to save him from the Nazis. When they get to the church, the priest approaches Pepik. “Pepik, come here,” Anneliese orders. “Say hello to Father Wilhelm.” Like a good little boy he does as he is told, extending his hand. “I didn’t touch the horsies,” is all he says.
What a deft way of showing the reader that Pepik is still so young that he believes everyone is in his world all the time. Pepik jumps right to what he thinks will keep him out of trouble with a grown-up who in truth doesn’t know what the boy is talking about. To Pepik, of course, the priest must have nothing on his mind but the question of whether Pepik was a good boy.
As the situation grows more desperate, Pepik’s parents send him off on a Kindertransport train. From that point forward the point of view shifts between Marta, who stays behind, and the little boy. Readers will by now be so attached to this sweet and oblivious child that his tribulations as he travels to a foreign land with only children for company, and then is abandoned even by them, will be painfully touching. Marta eventually drifts away from the Bauer family, but not before an event transpires that will change her life forever and provide the explanation of who the dying man in the hospital is, and why his visitor cares.
Some of Pick’s impetus for writing, and the genesis of some of the plot is her own family background. Her grandfather owned a textile mill in the north of Czechoslovakia, and her father had a nanny who was a Sudetenland German. Though he was eventually more successful at escape than the doomed characters in Pick’s novel, his family’s failed attempts, and memories of those relatives they lost (named at the outset of the novel) are among the stories Pick grew up with.
Far to Go is an engrossing work, well worth reading. At roughly 300 pages, it would make an excellent choice for busy readers and their book clubs.
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Corona is a professor of humanities at San Diego City College, an author, and freelance writer. She may be contacted at laurel.corona@sdjewishworld.com To purchase this book, click below: